


encounters

by kickwiththefray



Category: The Smiths
Genre: And Now For Something Completely Different, Established Relationship, Ghosts, Haunted House, M/M, death?? I mean there are ghosts. so., kind of includes a mystery, mild horror? I guess, pretend it's october, spooky times
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-04-27 08:59:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14421978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kickwiththefray/pseuds/kickwiththefray
Summary: Johnny and Morrissey are ghosthunters of the unconventional kind: Johnny wants to find ghosts so he could record them since their presence creates cool and eerie sound effects and traces of noise. Morrissey is just there out of curiosity, to write, and spend time with his sound-obsessed boyfriend.





	encounters

**Author's Note:**

> HEYY everyone I wasn’t supposed to write a weirdly halloweeney au again but this idea just came to me suddenly and I wanted to try to write something hmmmm more atmospheric and different/experimental??? idk moz and johnny find a big ass mansion and explore it, basically, I hope it’s not boring
> 
> ...btw sometimes I don’t even know myself why i write marrissey, but maybe it’s because it’s fun to make almost completely fictional characters out of their past selves and toy with it, I guess. Who knows. don’t think of the real ppl behind it too much I guess (which, I’m aware, is really fucking ironic)
> 
> anyway enjoy!

The intensifying rain herded them inside much faster than they would have liked. They ran breathlessly from the car and tried not to trip on the muddy weeds in the drive while they gripped the recording equipment under the protection of their jackets tightly so they wouldn’t get wet and ruined.

That was that for ceremony, not to mention subtlety, Morrissey thought as they’d managed to wrench the old, heavy front door open with the loudest of creaks and stumbled inside.

”We’re dripping all over their doormat, how embarrassingly uncouth of us,” he whispered, feeling the dustmotes in the air responding to their sudden presence and filling their lungs with the house’s musty and heavy essence.

”There isn’t any doormat,” Johnny said almost as quietly and shook off the some of the raindroplets off his hair - which somehow still retained the form of a quiff - while Morrissey did nothing to stop the drops from pouring down his face and neck uncomfortably.

The vestibule was dark, but once they’d carefully made their way to the parlour the windows, most of which were still intact, let in pale slivers of moonlight which allowed them to see just about enough, but not much about the details. Johnny turned on his torch before Morrissey could ask him not to, not just yet. After their torches were on the houses always lost that feeling of being untouched, like there was nothing wrong; the torches revealed the blemishes in the walls in ways that the indifferent moonlight didn’t, and made the places feel more desolate and unnatural. After that it was too late to go back to the way the house felt just after entering, to that moment when you could feel what it was really like there when you weren’t intruding.

There were shattered pieces of glass on the dark oak floors, whether it was from some of the broken windows, old photo frames or something else, it was hard to tell. Yellow and brown autumn leaves had flown in at places and joined the shards. Most of the heavy furniture was still there, as well as ’worthless’ personal or decorative objects, although many of them had also been thrown on the floors. Morrissey didn’t think it was _that_ hard to put a thing back in its place if you didn’t want it but understood, even if he didn’t approve, the animalistic urge to drop things and the simple minded pleasure of knowing you never needed to pick them up again.

The house stretched in two directions from the lounge, and there was a wide staircase as well leading upstairs. They decided to head to the branch which seemed smaller first, even though they didn’t really need to be time efficient at all. It consisted of a large dining room and a small corridor that lead to an old fashioned kitchen, one of those that wasn’t visible to possible dinner guests so you didn’t need to experience something as terrifying as seeing a kitchen maid working.

Most of the chairs were missing from the dining room’s sturdy table, and it made Morrissey sad for some reason, although he wasn’t quite sure why. In a way, he found it to be a metaphor for people who were gone. But the room also just looked empty without them. A modestly sized chandelier had fallen directly in the middle of the dining table, and some of the glimmering bits and pieces had spread as far as to the kitchen corridor.

Johnny was walking along back to the lounge ahead of him with short but quick steps that made the oak floors groan ever so slightly. Morrissey’s slower, longer steps were like a strange echo to them, and he wondered if somebody was already listening to their steps and adding an echo of their own. He trailed his fingers along the walls as he walked, feeling the bumps caused by moisture and neglect in the faded rose-patterned wallpaper, and letting them glide all over when the walls changed to a rich wood paneling.

”It’s a beautiful house,” Morrissey said, feeling the need to state the obvious even though they hadn’t even seen the whole of it yet.

”Mm-hmm,” Johnny agreed. He was inspecting a set of framed photographs on the wall, the only ones to be still standing on the lounge’s walls. ”Come look at these.”

They were family group photos, spanning perhaps from the late 19th century to the late 1960s, judging by their clothes. Even though the later photos were obviously taken with newer cameras so one didn’t need to sit still for so long, the expressions on the people’s faces remained stern. Maybe it was to accomplish a dignified, wealthy air. Or maybe there was a running family trait of hating having one’s picture taken. It could be that they were just sad.

”Who d’you think we’ll meet today?” Johnny asked.

” _If_ we meet anybody.”

”’Course we will, with a house this old and a family that big. You can’t tell me all of those went quietly.”

”Hm, yes,” Morrissey conceded and considered the faces. After a while he pointed at an old, mean-looking man. ”I hope not him.”

They moved on. Even though there weren’t that many rooms, there were still unnecessary corridors and little passageways preceding the rooms, much like the vestibule at the front door. It made the house feel like a little maze. As they went through the rooms – an empty room except for a desk, a small library which delighted Morrissey, and some sort of secondary sitting-room – they noticed the house was slightly U-shaped with the lounge as the bend, and through some of the windows they could see that in the middle there was a courtyard garden with a large decorative pool.

Johnny started fiddling with his recorder soon, eager to see if there were any traces of noise yet, so Morrissey handed him the cassette deck recorder he’d been carrying for him and watched him set it up along with his reel-to-reel tape recorder for a while, holding up their torches for him until he was all set up. He wandered off back to the library eventually, as there was a limit to how long you could feign interest in white noise. It made him nervous, too; waiting to see if there were any slight shifts and changes in the playback noise, when he could just do something else while he waited.

The library had a broken window too, which made Morrissey worry over the fate of the books it still contained. The window was small and far enough from the shelves that the rain couldn’t properly get in, but there was still moisture in the air, and it was inevitable that all those great – or bad – works and thousands of words would become mouldy at some point.

He read the spines of every book in the library, scanning them with his eyes to see whether he’d read any of them or if there were any he recognized, and he was sorely tempted to take just a few of the ones that he’d always wanted to read, but he resisted the urge and let them be. Could ghosts read? Would they be upset if their books went missing? There was a lot he didn’t know yet, might in fact never know.

After inspecting the shelves he sat down on a worn ottoman. Had it grown colder already? He pulled his long coat a bit tighter around him and dug out a small notebook and a pen out of its inner pocket.

He glanced at his wrist watch and opened an empty page in the notebook.

_12.45 AM_  
_the gargantuan house on the hill sighs from loneliness and keeps the memories of a family now forgotten. Johnny has, through records and connections, found out it belonged to a family for decades until the line was ~~snuffed out~~ extinguished and the house left to suffocate not that long ago, and to be pillaged by people who are no more boorish in their motivations than us when you think about it - -_

”I’m going upstairs,” Johnny announced from a distance, making him freeze for a second with the pen hovering over the paper.

”Wait for me!” he pleaded quietly, shoving the writing instruments back in his pockets hastily.

  
They ascended the lounge’s staircase together carefully, in case of decay in the steps, but the house was still in good condition so they had no trouble. In fact the upstairs looked much better; no broken windows since there was no sense in breaking in through the second floor, so no litter either, and it seemed that the looters hadn’t dared to venture so far into the building. It was much easier, both physically and on one’s conscience, to scuttle in to an abandoned house and grab a few of the nearest objects and leave before anyone saw you. It’s almost like you weren’t really there, you weren’t committed to stealing from someone, you just happened to pass by. Once one starts dragging things from another floor like it’s a moving day, the thievery is obvious. At least, that’s how Morrissey saw it.

The stairs lead them to a landing that he estimated to be above the dining room. On one side of the landing they could see two small bedrooms and a bathroom and another nonsensical corridor. They turned around and went to the opposite side and came to a spacious room that had floorboards so scuffed that it looked like over the decades people had danced there, an observation which was supported by -

”Oh, wow!” Johnny breathed out, as soon they saw the old, faded green grand piano. There were gilded decorative leaves entwined on it, and it looked very dusty.

There was another door in the room leading to the rest of the second floor. At a quick glance Morrissey could see it opened to a corridor and most likely some more bedrooms, but Johnny was evidently more interested in the piano to pursue that direction yet.

Johnny went to the piano and laid his recorders down on the floor so he could press down a couple of keys in a simple melody. The sound made chills go down Morrissey’s back. Even he could tell that the piano was terribly out of tune, but it wasn’t just that, it was how loud and permeating the shrill sound felt in the quiet house. Especially since the sounds of the rain and wind weren’t as loud upstairs, due to the intact windows. But, he supposed, they couldn’t just toe around quietly all night, as if to pretend they weren’t there. In fact it made it more eerie if they did.

”Found any traces of noise yet?” he asked in a normal voice, feeling encouraged to talk louder now.

”Not much,” Johnny admitted. He looked a bit disappointed. ”We might need to spend a bit more time here than usual. D’ya mind?”

”No, not really. There are worse ways to spend one’s Saturdays… although it’s a bit cold in here.”

”Come sit here with me,” Johnny said, plopping down on the old piano stool. It had a worn cushion embedded in it, and it let out a cloud of dust when Johnny sat on it. ”I might as well record this piano, too? Fits in with the creepy soundscape.”

The stool wasn’t too small but they still had to shuffle very close to each other, and Morrissey, with his taller and awkward limbs, felt like an inelegant spider that was spreading in every direction. Still, it was nice, sitting so close to Johnny, and it helped a little with the cold.

Johnny picked up the tape recorder, pressed a few buttons on it so that it started recording from the right spot and handed it over for Morrissey to hold, and started playing a variety of tunes. They weren’t really songs, more like different loops of melodies that flowed from one to the next, something Johnny could use later and figure out what to do with them. The years, the cold, and the neglect had created an uniquely haunting sound to the piano, like everything you played on it came from some other realm, slightly wrong and somewhere far away in time and distorted by the distance. But it did sound good, in a strangely beautiful way.

After a while of watching Johnny’s fingers traveling across the piano keys Morrissey slouched down as best as he could so he could rest his head on Johnny’s shoulder, but lightly enough so that he wouldn’t be pressing down on Johnny’s arm while he played. The leather jacket under his cheek was still a bit moist, but he didn’t mind. He closed his eyes and let the music, the coldness of the room, the warmth of Johnny, the gentle sounds of raindrops touching the windows, the confusing sadness of the house – everything – wash over him. If he tried not to think – or, rather, if he tried to think differently, he could almost make himself believe he didn’t know where he was for a moment. He could be in this abandoned house. It could be 1983. Or it could be any time, he might not exist at all.

He frowned to himself and his thoughts, and opened his eyes again. Johnny was now playing a waltz-like song, something more consistent. He wasn’t sure if he’d heard it before or if Johnny had come up with it on the spot, but it sounded slow and pleasant, in that distorted way. And timeless. He wondered whether Johnny was playing it to please the dead or the two of them, but he didn’t ask so he wouldn’t disrupt the recording.

When Johnny eventually stopped playing, an involuntary shiver went through Morrissey. Now that it was quiet again, he was instinctively waiting to hear something else, a reaction from the house or something like that. But none came. He placed his finger on the stop-button of the recorder, and glanced at Johnny, who gave him a nod, so he pressed it.

”Still cold?” Johnny asked, having noticed the shiver.

”Mm,” Morrissey assented. ”But it’s not just that.”

”Are you scared?” Johnny asked next, without any scorn or fussy worry either, more like as one would enquire about something natural and expected.

”A bit,” Morrissey said with a nod. ”The house is so massive and… I don’t know… when you don’t know _where_ and when they’ll come it’s unsettling, you don’t know where you’re supposed to be.”

”I know,” Johnny agreed, and took the tape recorder from Morrissey. He rewinded it for a while, searching for some part, until he found the point when he’d started playing the waltzy song. Then he stood up from the piano stool and took Morrissey’s hand. ”Do you want to dance?”

”What?” Morrissey laughed in surprise. ”I’m dreadful at dancing, you know this.”

”I’m dreadful too,” Johnny shrugged. He placed the tape recorder on the floor, adjusted the volume a bit higher and hit the play button. Then he turned to Morrissey and looked at him expectantly, with his arms extended.

”Oh, alright,” he said, getting up as well and going to Johnny’s arms as the song started playing from the recorder.

They stood there hesitantly for a while, neither remembering what the correct waltz-pose was supposed to be like, where exactly you were supposed to put your hands, but ended up with some sort of embrace, clasping one hand to the other’s.

”Who’s going to lead?” Johnny asked.

”Me, I’m not graceful enough to know how to dance backwards, I’ll fall,” Morrissey said, and took a hesitant step forward, and then another, Johnny stepping backwards and swaying with him.

”I mean, you’re going backwards at some point anyway,” Johnny pointed out with amusement, nodding to Morrissey’s feet, which were indeed now taking a step back, like you were supposed to while waltzing.

”Oh. Right,” Morrissey said, feeling a bit dim and blushing with embarrasment.

”I’ll catch you if you fall, though,” Johnny said with a laugh, and gave him a little kiss on the lips in consolation, which made Morrissey falter with his steps.

As neither of them actually knew how to properly dance, it wasn’t the most elegant moment, but it felt good to be there together, do something completely normal and grounding as they waited. The moonlight let out more light in this room which allowed them to see where they were going, although it was still quite dark. The floorboards creaked as they stepped back and forth in time with the recorded piano, and as eerie as the entire situation was, the desperately romantic side of Morrissey enjoyed it immensely.

It felt as if the room grew colder as they danced, and after a few minutes they gave up on trying to actually waltz and just held each other close while they shuffled their feet slowly about and turned in small circles. Morrissey tried burrowing his face into Johnny’s shoulder and neck, inhaling the scent of his skin and the leather of his jacket.

The two doors that were on the opposite sides of the room were left wide open by the two of them, and every time they spun around so that Morrissey couldn’t see the doorways, he felt a persistent feeling of being watched, like someone was standing there, at the doorframes. It felt similar to the feeling he sometimes had in the shower at home, when he’d accidentally convince himself someone was standing in the room but couldn’t look because he had his eyes closed and shampoo falling down his face, except this feeling was more real, more plausible considering where they were.

At each next spin, when he was facing either of the doors he looked up but couldn’t see anything. After a while of trying to ignore the sensation he realized the song sounded different. Louder? Clearer? Less like a recording. He glanced at the tape recorder, as if it would provide him with answers, and then at the piano, but they had drifted away from it so that they were at an angle where he couldn’t see the keys. Now that he was paying attention, the playing sounded slightly different to Johnny’s, too. Less like the genuine, creative way he played it, more like someone trying to be precise and follow instructions, but doing it rigidly.

”That’s not you,” Morrissey whispered, realizing it fully as he said it.

”No,” Johnny agreed with a tiny shake of his head against Morrissey’s. ”I think the recording happened to stop right as someone joined in.”

”They’re watching us?” Morrissey asked, trying to raise his voice to at least a murmur, so he wouln’t feel as self-conscious about the situation. They were still dancing slowly. ”Should we do something? Do you want to go press the record button?”

”Not yet,” Johnny said, rubbing his hand up and down on Morrissey’s back gently. ”Let’s let them watch. Make them get used to us.”

”Okay,” Morrissey said, and tried not to stare at the doorways or at the piano in case the ghost – or ghosts – became shy and went away. ”Whoever that is, they’re not nearly as good as you.”

”Hey,” Johnny laughed quietly and swatted at his back. ”I think it’s pretty good.” Then he sort of playfully nudged at Morrissey with his entire body, even as they swayed. ”Better than you, at least.”

”Well, you’re not wrong there,” Morrissey admitted. They giggled a little, partly from their exchange of words but also with nervousness.

Their dancing started to resemble waltzing once again, as if by some unspoken agreement they’d decided to put on a bit of a show now that they had an audience. They were both slightly breathless, having probably danced for at least ten minutes by now, and Morrissey felt a tiny bit dizzy from all the spinning and the dusty air that surrounded them.

Suddenly the piano let out a loud, low slam, as someone stopped playing and pressed down hard on many of the keys on the left. It made Morrissey and Johnny both jump, stop their dancing, and look at the piano.

A woman was standing there. Or, a ghost of a woman. It was translucent and slightly blue as usual, wavering and changing between becoming more visible and fading out again, but didn’t fade out completely as they looked at her. She looked like she was in her early thirties, and the slim skirt of her dress was high and long. She had dark curls that just about brushed her shoulders, and she looked wealthy and stately with her heels and pearls. Morrissey judged her to be from the 1930s, maybe.

At the moment her stately air was marred by a distraught expression on her face, however. She turned to look at the two of them, almost accusingly.

”George?” she said.

”Hello?” Morrissey said, to be polite, but also just to say something.

Morrissey was aware of Johnny’s movements near him as he moved away to the tape recorder so he could start recording their conversation and the noises the woman’s presence was emitting.

”George!” the woman said again urgently. As she spoke, Morrissey could just about hear the undercurrent of noise, the static-like sort of howling and moaning that would completely replace the ghosts’ speaking voice once it was captured on recording. ”You need to tell him...”

”Who’s that? Tell him what?” Morrissey asked kindly. Johnny was now holding the recorder up next to Morrissey.

”He isn’t allowed, you need to tell him,” the woman repeated.

”What do we need to tell him?” Morrissey repeated patiently in turn, by now rather used to how irregular and repetitive conversations with ghosts could be, as well as their fluctuating tempers.

”George,” she said again, in a tone that sounded stern and chiding, and then she disappeared.

Morrissey and Johnny shared a glance. Not sure if they should try to find the woman again or wait for her again, they stayed in the room for now, Johnny moving his recorders around the room and the doorways, testing the equipment again, and Morrissey sitting down on the piano stool. He felt an urge to go downstairs to the lounge and look at the photographs again to try to find her there, but he didn’t want to move in case she returned.

Johnny didn’t seem to be able to decide where to put his reel-to-reel tape recorder, as he was pacing around with it, picking it up and listening to what it had recorded and placing it somewhere else again, outside the room or on top of the piano. Morrissey was slightly annoyed by the roaming and the sound of Johnny’s footsteps going back and forth on the creaky floors, but he didn’t say anything. He knew Johnny wanted to find a good, noise-filled place for it so he could leave it there and carry the smaller tape recorder around with him.

He reached in his pocket for the notebook, and picked up his torch again.

_1.22 AM_  
_who is George? A husband? A brother? - -_

He could hear the sound of someone running, now, in short, quick steps. The footsteps skipped a beat sometimes, like someone was jumping around while running. Just as he realized it came from the landing outside the room, the sound stopped.

_\- - Or perhaps a child? Her child?_

Johnny had rushed out the door with the reel-to-reel.

”There’s nobody here,” he informed back at Morrissey from the corridor, but didn’t come back into the room yet, probably having decided to place the recorder there.

”George?” the sound of the woman’s voice said suddenly right next to Morrissey.

”Christ,” Morrissey couldn’t help but breathe out, heart beating fast from the surprise.

The woman was looking at him, but also around her, like she was searching for something – most probably George – and something about her look felt like she was pleading him to help her. She started walking – or gliding – away, towards the other door in the room. He scrambled up from the piano stool and looked behind him.

”Johnny?” he called out, while following the ghost. Johnny appeared in the other doorway with a quizzical expression. ”It’s her, I think she wants me to follow. Maybe.”

He followed the ghost into the next room, which was a narrow corridor that seemed to lead to some of the other bedrooms. The roof was sloping down a little there, and it felt rather like an attic. He could hear Johnny walking to the piano room, but he didn’t turn to wait for him in case he lost sight of the ghost. But, even then, she vanished before he’d had time to go far. He stopped and sighed with exasperation.

”And she’s gone agai-” he started to say to Johnny, half-turning, but his sentence was interrupted by the door slamming shut hard behind him.

”Moz?” he could hear Johnny from the other side of the door, and then a rattling of the doorknob. ”It won’t open?”

Morrissey looked around in bewilderment, but he was still alone. Whoever closed that door – the woman, the child? - didn’t appear or show any reason for this stunt. It was just their temperament, he reminded himself. They weren’t behaving rationally. He knew he shouldn’t panic about it, but he felt afraid anyway. He didn’t like having a door forcibly closed between him and Johnny when he didn’t know how to get back. He was sure he hadn’t seen a way to the stairs from where he was now. On top of that it was much darker here than it had been in the music room, since the windows were scarce and small, and weren’t in the path of the moonlight. He was glad he’d had the torch in his hand when he’d followed the woman there.

”Are you okay?” Johnny asked when he hadn’t said anything. ”Are you still there?”

”Yes,” he said, and tried to open the door as well without any luck. It was a bulky, old door, so it wasn’t unheard of that such a thing would get stuck, but he knew it wasn’t merely stuck; some force was keeping it closed for him. He leaned his forehead briefly against the door, breathing deeply. ”I’ll look around and see what happens. It’s fine, you just take care of your recordings.”

”Are you sure?” Johnny sounded hesitant.

”Yes. For heaven’s sake, Johnny, what are you going to do, take a hatchet to the door? I’ll find my way out somehow,” he replied, a bit frustrated now, but in truth he was only trying to convince himself that there was nothing to fear.

 

Maybe, if he had a better sense of direction, the house would have made more sense to him. As it was, he did get lost for quite a while. Although a part of that was to be blamed on his inevitable curiosity about the house and the ghosts; instead of dedicating his time to sensibly finding out which door lead where, he looked at all the objects in the bedrooms and listened to all the noises he could hear, and tried to imagine what life in a house like this had been like. He became distracted, and by the time he had entered another room, he had forgotten which way he’d entered it. It felt as if the upstairs was bigger than the downstairs, which made no sense, and all the heavy dust was making his head feel cloggy.

He encountered George at some point. Or, at least, he assumed it was George. The ghost was a small child, perhaps five years old, although he could never tell the ages of children apart. He was wearing shorts and a sweater vest, not unlike the clothes he’d been dressed in himself as a child. Even for a ghost, the child looked pale, and his round eyes were never really focused on Morrissey when he looked at him; he was looking everywhere else. It wasn’t like the frantic, searching look of the ghost of the woman, more like he wanted to look at everything and Morrissey wasn’t the most interesting thing on his list. Which, he thought, was very fair.

”Frog!” the boy said at one point, after he’d been running around the rooms with Morrissey trying to keep up behind him. He wasn’t sure if the boy was talking to him or not. ”You’re not looking!”

Then he would disappear, and reappear not too much later, making Morrissey chase around him again and trying to understand what it was that he was trying to convey. Sometimes, some of the doors would slam shut again while he was following George, almost as if someone was trying to prevent their movement. At times they closed behind him so it didn’t affect him, but sometimes he had to find a detour while George just glided through the closed doors. It was exhausting, and despite his best efforts to ignore the fact, he was scared. He gripped his torch tighter and hoped its batteries would last.

 

 _1.39 AM_  
_The child – George – keeps talking about a frog and I haven’t a clue whether it’s an euphemism of some sort, or a genuine love for amphibians... does he think_ he’s _a frog? Should I tell him he’s a ghost? Although to do so would be completely futile, considering it’s nigh impossible to reason with people who are no longer completely on this plane of existence. He keeps insisting I (or whoever it is he’s talking to) am not looking at the frog, how I should just come look. Well, George, it would certainly be easier if one knew where the frog was._

  
He opened a door he’d passed a couple of times and assumed to be some sort of cupboard by the way it was off to the side, and stared at the spiral staircase it revealed blankly for a while. There was another staircase, and they hadn’t noticed it when they’d taken their tour of downstairs. He wondered why that was, until he realized it had probably been some sort of housemaid’s entrance once, hidden from plain view, like the kitchen.

He went down gratefully, and found his theory proven when he found himself in a set of rooms that he and Johnny hadn’t seen earlier, which also made the seemingly larger size of the upstairs floor make sense. He thought the rooms may have belonged to the servants or housemaids once, but it looked like they had been renovated at some point and then sort of abandoned, because they didn’t seem to have any particular use anymore. There were sofas, tables, and in another small room some old cleaning equipment, a washing machine from the 1940s most likely.

”I told him not to, he isn’t allowed to be there on his own. Why didn’t Betty watch him?” he heard the woman’s voice say, and she materialized – if her form could be called material – close to him, once again looking very distressed. ”Tell George, don’t let him!”

”Allowed where?” Morrissey asked, pretending he wasn’t startled again. There was something very unsettling about the woman’s anguish. ”What happened to your George?”

The woman let out a mournful howling in reply that made Morrissey shiver, a noise so dismal that he was sorry Johnny wasn’t around to capture it. She was gone again.

  
He found another of those discreet, unassuming doors. He opened it and finally saw something familiar: it was definitely one of the small corridors he and Johnny had perused earlier. He stood at the door, wondering if he should go find Johnny, but he had an inkling the ghosts were about to reveal something, that if he disrupted this moment he might not see them anymore. The amount of times the ghosts had revealed themselves to him tonight was quite unusual; he was sure something was truly bothering them and keeping them here.

He backtracked his steps towards the direction where the woman had appeared, and noticed a door that was leading outside this time. Through the glass in the door he could see it lead to the courtyard. It was still raining, he could see the drops of water hitting the dark surface of the large decorative pool and creating circles in it. George was running around outside, exploring everything it seemed. It was curious, seeing rain fall directly through a ghost.

Morrissey pushed the door open and entered the courtyard, not really minding getting wet again from the rain because the fresh air after the mustiness of the house felt so good.

There were flagstones creating a path and lining the pool, but they were barely visible because the unclipped grass had overgrown all around it and pushed its way between the stones. There were shrubs and a couple of small trees too, and a rusty looking bench. It had all probably looked very lovely once, Morrissey thought as he peered into the decorative pool’s dark water. The pool’s egdes consisted of slippery stones that were piled quite high upon each other, and were now half-covered with moss. He thought it was a bit extravagant to have such a large pool for no other purpose than looking at it, but the house itself was so lavish that he wasn’t surprised.

He crouched and pointed his torch at the water, which was all slimy and had probably developed its own ecosystem by now, but through all the murkiness he could see that it looked very deep. His hand almost slipped from its hold on one of the stones, and it occured to him how easy it would be to trip and fall in the pool.

He looked up at George, who was, for the first time, looking straight at him.

”Save the frog,” the boy said beseechingly.

”George? Was the frog in the pool?” Morrissey asked, suddenly beginning to realize what was going on with a nasty sinking feeling in his stomach. ”Was the frog there, in the water?”

”Mommy won’t come look, the frog needs help,” George said, pointing into the depths of the pool now.

There was no movement in the water apart from the raindrops, but Morrissey could guess that about fifty years ago, the boy had seen a frog there.

”Frogs can swim, you _fool_ ,” Morrissey said sharply, not caring about being a little mean. He was feeling confusingly distressed and desperate to make the child understand, even though he knew full well it was too late. ”George, the frog can swim? It can swim, _you don’t need to try to save it_.”

But the ghost of the child wasn’t next to him anymore.

Morrissey thought he could see something else beneath the water’s surface now, a large unmoving shape, but he didn’t want to look, and he pointed the torch’s light away from it. He felt a lump in his throat, making it hard to breathe for a moment. He squeezed his eyes shut and felt the rain falling on his eyelids, and when he opened his eyes again the pool was devoid of anything except the plants that were growing in it.

He stumbled away from the pool, not feeling up to being so near to it anymore. For a moment it was absolutely quiet, apart from the sounds of the rain and the occasional wind and his ragged, deep breathing. After a while he thought he could hear the sound of sobbing being carried through the wind.

”Not Betty’s fault… my fault,” the woman’s voice whispered around him, until the voice was carried away like it had never been there.

Someone was calling _his_ name now, and in his disorientation it took him a couple of seconds to realize it was Johnny’s voice, coming from a distance. There were real, solid footsteps running towards him, and there, from around the corner of the house’s left wing came Johnny, pushing overgrown branches of trees out of his way as he entered the courtyard.

”Moz!” Johnny said breathlessly, skidding to a halt next to him and grabbing his arm firmly. ”You were gone for ages?” he said, sounding upset. ”Then I saw you were here, through one of the windows, but I couldn’t find the right door and I had to go out the front door and erm, go round the house… Bloody hell the grass was so tangled... Are you okay?”

”Yeah,” Morrissey said quietly, glad and relieved to see him again but quite shaken by what he’d witnessed.

”Did you see something?” Johnny asked, linking his arm through Morrissey’s and leaning into him.

Morrissey glanced back at the pool, drawing Johnny’s attention to it too. ”I think he fell in and drowned… The boy, I mean. And nobody ever came to look at the frog like he wanted to, and she was upset about him sneaking off to the pool unsupervised, and she can’t stop it from happening,” he explained, half-aware of the fact that Johnny probably didn’t know anything about a frog.

”Oh,” Johnny said.

They stood there for a moment, not saying anything. Morrissey felt himself start to tremble a little from the cold.

”Do you think she’ll ever look at the frog, then?” Johnny asked eventually, apparently catching on to what Morrissey had been talking about and piecing it together.

”I don’t think she’ll be able to see anything but him in there, do you?” Morrissey mused.

”No, probably not,” Johnny agreed. ”So they’re stuck?”

”I think so.”

They were silent again for a while, contemplating the nature of life and how some things would always have to remain constant, and how there wasn’t anything you could do about it now. Morrissey wondered if the ghosts would ever learn to let go, if the people who had lived in the house after them had had to witness this tragedy too, over and over again.

”Let’s go home. This place is dreary,” Johnny said, once they were both starting to feel dismal and entirely too cold.

”Isn’t that the point?” Morrissey asked, slightly amused despite himself. What kind of lousy ghosthunters were they?

”Yeah… but it’s a bit _too_ dreary. And we’re soaked. I got enough recording done, anyway. We can go to my place and have tea and snuggle up or something, ay?” Johnny suggested with a shrug, watching Morrissey closely, like he was worried about him getting lost in the history of the house and was now coaxing him back.

He didn’t really need much coaxing. He couldn’t wait to be dry again and not have to think about being covered in water, or about pools, or about things that were in the pools, although a part of him knew he’d never be able to forget the house.

They went back in through the secret way Morrissey had found so they wouldn’t have to walk by the pool again, picked up the recording equipment and left the house, leaving behind nothing save perhaps for footprints on the dusty floors, having witnessed something new but not changed anything.

Morrissey watched the house recede into the distance from the car’s wing mirrors and sighed, out of sadness, out of contentment at driving off with Johnny and the prospect of being somewhere warm, and out of relief that it wasn’t him who was stuck in time, haunting a lonesome house.

**Author's Note:**

> sorry that was a bit grim lol


End file.
